When it rains it pours...

You know the old saying "when it rains, it pours"? The same can be said about this years prep work for the tax papers. As if things wouldn't be already difficult enough by themselves...no...on top of that our software is making things even more difficult, by being what can only be described as stubburn and counterproductive.
When I was prepping the paperwork an account called "Misc. Balance Transfer" struck me as particularly odd. This acount is not supposed to be there and there's not suposed to be any amount on that account. Expecially not several hundred grand. But even when I looked into the details I couldn't figure out where that thing really came from. Of course it was clear to me that it could only come from a inblance between Debit and Credit Side. But that really doesn't help a lot. Neiter did that what the software guys told me. What the were telling me is something that I was aware of to begin with. When one of the tax guys what at the office we spent hours looking for that inbalance when it started to hit me what must have happened. When we entered the value for the opening balance we accidentally entered it in the wrong busness year. By the time we did that the previous business year was still open and so teh system automaticlly puts the opening blance into the first open business year, reagardless if it belongs there or not. The only way to avoid that is to either close the old business year first or specifically tell the software to put this opening balance into a different business year.
That's definitely somehting that I hate about our acounting software, since there are quite a number of traps in it. And it always takes hours to figure out what has happened. But all that still doesn't solve the problem. I will have no other choice than to delete all the wrong opening balance entries. Good thing I have an rough idea with that date they had been made. But before I can start deleting entries I have to make sure that the difference between what the opening balance should have been and what the opening blance of the previous business year currently is...is exactly the amount that is right now on the "Misc. Balance Transfer Account". Once I'm certain of that I will have the somewhat questionable fun of making the changes, so that we start the business year that we're currently preparing the tax work for starts with the right opening balance.
That's definitely on of the situations when I hate being an accountant and being quite good at my job, otherwise I would have never ever noticed the problem in the first place.It's bad enough having to do that in 1 sub-company, but I will have to do that in 2. And to give me even way more fun than that alone, it will fall to me closing up all business years in all sub-companies, since it seems that I'm the only one who knows enough about the software to do that. So it will be another 3 or 4 weeks at least until I'll be able to say "the business year finally starts with the right opening balance". So at times accounting can be somewhat of frustrating.